August 17, 2024

My App Ideas Volume 1

I wrote a book about how I created Bank Statement Converter. You can read it here. At the end of the book I wrote this: A lot of people have emailed me asking for my ideas. This is kind of funny I think, when someone comes to me and says they have an app idea I think “oh man please go away and leave me alone”. I guess it’s different because I’ve actually made apps that make money.

July 1, 2024

Maximising Enjoyment of a StarCraft: Brood War Bug

Midway through 2007 I was playing StarCraft and someone nuked my base from his base. This shouldn’t have been possible because StarCraft requires you use a ghost (an infantry unit) to target the nuke. The ghost can target the nuke a maximum of few inches in front of itself. The targeting phase lasts about 10 seconds and if the ghost is killed in this phase the nuke does not land.

February 8, 2024

Fixing a Chrome + Windows Game Bug

A few weeks ago I added voice acting into Busty Barrister Barbara. It worked fine, until I tested out a Web build on my Windows PC. The audio sounded terrible, it sounded like it had gaps in it. Interestingly the bug only occured on Google Chrome for Windows. Windows Chrome ❌ Windows Firefox ✅ MacOS Chrome ✅ MacOS Firefox ✅ MacOS Safari ✅ Sadly about 3.22 billion people use Google Chrome for Windows.

January 9, 2024

Busty Barrister - Day 53

Happy new year to you all, hopefully Busty Barrister Barbara will sells billions of copies in 2024. I can’t believe it has been over a week since I’ve written a blog post. ✅ Hire someone to make music and SFX I placed a job ad on Upwork. A lot of people applied. I hired three of them for paid trials. They should all be done by Friday this week. I’ll share their work here.

December 31, 2023

Busty Barrister - Day 44

Christmas Day is my birthday, so please say “Happy birthday Angus” to yourself as you read this blog post. I had a pretty good Christmas. Spent a lot of time with my girlfriend’s family. Interestingly my Dad’s side of the family did not meet up for Christmas this year. My Mum’s side of the family live in Australia, so yeah, didn’t see those guys either. I spent a lot of time working on Busty Barrister Barabara actually.

December 23, 2023

Busty Barrister - Day 36

The main character of this game is loosely based off my Aunt who is a barrister. She’s going to be mad if she ever finds out. I saw her for lunch today, and asked her a bunch of questions about the various courts in Hong Kong. She told me the district courts have open galleries so I can just go in and watch a case. She also told me that The High Court is used only when the penatly for a crime is expected to be greater than seven years.

December 18, 2023

Busty Barrister - Finishing Level One

Try out the latest build. I started working on Busty Barrister Barbara on November 17 2023. Just over one month ago. The game not done, and it probably wont be done for at least another three months. Game development is very different to business application development. When I made BankStatementConverter I coded it for a week, and got it into production. I spent the next three years improving it. You can’t really do that for a visual novel, gamers want to play the game when it’s done, not when it’s full of bugs and temporary art.

December 15, 2023

Implementing Branches

Try out the latest build. The development of the engine for Busty Barrister Barbara has been going well. A few days ago I figured out how to deal with branching which was one of the last missing features. I’ve done this before in plenty of other games. What I normally do is: Make sure every event has an identifier. Chain events together with a nextEventId Create Decision events with multiple nextEventIds.

December 12, 2023

Building a Web Game in C

Christmas is coming up. When I used to work at a bank the entire month of December and a bit of January we were placed under “Change Freeze”. We weren’t allowed to deploy updates to our applications during this period. The thinking was: A lot of people are away over Christmas Application changes can lead to crashes People who know how to fix those crashes might be away To prevent this they just stopped us from deploying updates.

December 7, 2023

Simple Feature Gross Code

A few days ago I talked about supporting text events with multiple colours and multiple text speeds. I spent about eight hours writing the code. It took me a lot longer than I expected so I thought I’d share the details here. Example Data set_title(data, PHOENIX); set_text_color(data, SKYBLUE); add_show_text_V2(data, "They're saying the jay walker was... "); set_text_color(data, RED); add_show_text_V2(data, "you."); set_text_color(data, SKYBLUE); This is how I was expecting to set up the events.